Raves, rants, views, reviews, comments and experiences of a Common IT Man.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Sync BlackBerry on Ubuntu 9.04

One of the pitfalls of moving to Ubuntu 9.04 was that my BlackBerry Pearl stopped charging and synching with the computer. Here's how to resolve it ...
After a bit of googling, I stumbled upon the Barry Project which is an open source synchronization, backup, restore & management application for BB devices.

Install Barry
Open the Synaptics package manager & do a quick search for "barry".
Select & install the packages barrybackup-gui, opensync-plugin-barry, barry-util & libbarry0.
Now create a new launcher on the desktop and enter the command as "/usr/bin/barrybackup".

Configure Barry
Connect your BB phone to your laptop and fire up the luancher short-cut created above.
Barry will assign a unique device PIN number and ask you to configure this device.
Assign a meaningful name and configure what you want to Backup & Restore. I normally choose only the Address Book as that is the only thing that I use.
Another option it asks is to Prompt for label on every backup - use this option if you want to append a specific label to the name of the file Barry creates. Note that the file name already has the PIN, date & the time in it so I leave this unchecked.

Use Barry
Now go ahead and press the Backup button to backup whatever you had configured it to!
Also, once the data has been backed up, you can run the launcher to restore previously backed-up data or to backup data again.